Algernon: your personal assistant for Squeak
7 May, 2008
A team of undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have just released “Algernon”, a new keyboard-based launcher to help you navigate around your Squeak environment.
Algernon was developed by Erik Hinterbichler and Joey Hagedorn with their CS598 classmates, working with Professor Ralph Johnson of the Software Architecture Group at UIUC. The developers say that Algernon provides lightning quick access to categories, classes, morphs, and global variables in your image, and is inspired by tools such as Quicksilver and LaunchBar for Mac OS X. Like Quicksilver, it learns from your behaviours, and will prioritise options that you use most often. It is triggered by pressing Control-Space Shift-Return, though this can be changed by editing Algernon>>activationString.
Algernon can be downloaded from SqueakMap using the SqueakMap package loader or from Squeaksource using Monticello, and requires KeyBinder to be installed as a prerequisite.
[Edited in light of Erik’s comments below.]
The Weekly Squeak 
8 May, 2008 at 15:10
could have just plugged it into Quicksilver
8 May, 2008 at 21:21
That’s not a bad idea given the announcement of SqueakFS the other day. It would certainly work for me, but most Squeak users are on other OSes, so wouldn’t benefit.
9 May, 2008 at 02:07
It actually doesn’t require KeyBinder to be installed anymore. Also, as of the 1.0.1 release, the activation command has been changed to Shift-return in order to avoid a conflict with eCompletion, which already used ctrl-space.
Erik
9 May, 2008 at 08:26
Shift-return, not Control-return 🙂
9 May, 2008 at 10:51
Oops – now corrected, thanks Erik.
9 May, 2008 at 12:55
Also available in Universe and future squeak-dev images.